Peak Oil in Higher Education III

I’ve written previously that I believe the crisis in Higher Education and Academic Publishing was one that was centered around the fact that the price of the commodity they were selling dropped to zero. The discussions between Verizon and Google have rekindled interest in “Net Neutrality,” the idea that the companies that provide access to [...]

The Low Cost of Maintaining your Digital Past

In the past there was a cost to maintaining the past. Nostalgic items took up space, coming at a physical cost; they also had a social cost which came in the form of partners, others and friends: “you really are still holding on to that? Just throw it out!” The combination of factors force individuals [...]

Not Liking something is not the same as not “liking” something

I’ve noticed a worrying trend among news agencies. It seems that it has become de rigeur to use the number of members of a facebook group as an indication of the popularity of a trend or movement. For example, here is a quote from a recent CNN.com article discussing the “quit facebook” movement: “More than [...]

What I would do for Five Bucks….

I was intrigued. The question of what I would do for five bucks lingered for days; obsessively I thought about what I could do. I needed a mental break on the weekends away from work and school work and thought that this was the perfect chance to monetize some of my hobbies. I liked to [...]

Peak Oil in Higher Education, Part II

I had another thought while attending the Digital University Conference at CUNY on Wednesday and that was a serious question about who the experts will be under the new system of digital and open scholarship. Currently, Digital Scholarship is not valued or accepted on par with traditional methods of academic valuation. By that I mean: [...]

Peak Oil in higher education

I believe it was Chris Anderson’s Free that made the claim that much Science Fiction writing could be summarized as such: Take one thing that is currently scarce and make it abundant and see what happens to the people and institutions that rely and maintain that thing. This is the hope of much of the innovation in [...]

Spam from Beyond

This morning I received an e-mail from an acquaintance who passed on a little over a year ago. Apparently she has come back from the afterworld to sell me and all of her e-mail contacts about various wonderdrugs and assorted pharmaceuticals (and at discount prices). The online accounts of the dead have been in the news as of [...]

“Mr. N.Y. Times, tear down this wall”

I sympathize with the New York Times. They’re a venerable institution with a long history of being a respected source for news, but I think they’re making a big mistake by moving behind a “paywall” in 2011. This is a case of an old media company not having the guts to stick to a new [...]

Augmented Reality as another re-envisioning of the future that never happened

As children, many people were brought up on the science-fiction of the 1970′s and 1980′s. There seemed to be a bounty of promise in this vision of a 3D virtualized, “everything at your fingers” holographic world.  ”Augmented Reality” seems to be another attempt to reconstruct the idyllic science-fiction fantasies of many adult’s childhood and less [...]

The need for a new kind of copyright

I have embraced with “open arms” Creative Commons’ effort to provide open and customizable copyrights. It has become quite clear that the “one size  fits all” copyright of old no longer works for everyone. There’s another kind of “copy right” that I think is missing in modern law and that is the idea of an [...]